Speed of Processing Phonological Information Presented Visually and Speechreading Proficiency

An experiment was designed to investigate whether the speed of processing phonological information presented visually is related to speechreading proficiency even after the proportion of the variance associated with an analytical consonantal viseme recognition task was taken into consideration. Young adults (n = 48) with normal hearing and vision completed 4 different visual-speech perception tasks: (a) a sentence level speechreading test, (b) a visual-consonant recognition task with instructions to focus on optimizing performance level, (c) the same visual-consonant recognition task with instructions to respond as rapidly as possible to each test-item, and, (d) a visual-gating task. The mean response-time data and the results from the visual-gating task were significantly correlated to the performances on the sentence speechreading test, indicating that speed of processing at the phonological level is related to speechreading proficiency for sentences. Performance on the visual-gating task was a better predictor of speechreading performance than was response-time on the visemerecognition task. Finally, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that together both the ability to identify consonants presented visually-only and the speed at which this task is accomplished contribute significantly to explaining the variance in performance on the speechreading test of sentence-length material.